Recently, the navigation technology has developed rapidly along with the automotive and digital technologies. Navigation means that an in-vehicle device using the map data displays a position of the vehicle, which is detected by a GPS or the like in a consecutive fashion, on a screen of a circumference map, and uses the display on the screen and speech synthesis to lead and guide the traveling direction and the like the vehicle to a specified destination along a most suitable guidance route.
A conventional navigation device has a so-called “highway mode” as a map display mode used when driving on an expressway, and information on parking areas in the vicinity of a vehicle position, service areas, interchanges and the like is displayed in an array in this mode. Further information can be viewed by scrolling this display (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-337896, for example).
It should be noted in the present application that “expressway” not only is a name or standard of a road such as “automobile road”, but also covers general roads, side walks, and a wide range of roads with predetermined configurations, which are isolated from sites of private residences and limit freedom of parking.
Incidentally, in order to have a pleasant ride, it is important to appropriately secure stop-off points for dining, restrooms, rest, fueling, shopping, making phone calls and the like. Particularly, expressways have much limitations as compared to general roads because these stop-off points are limited to a predetermined facility such as a parking area, thus securing the stop-off points needs to be well-planned.
Moreover, facilities such as parking areas and service areas differ specifically in terms of which type of facility as the element, such as a gas stations and a restaurant (referred to as “element facility” in the present application), is provided in these facilities. Therefore, when, for example, fueling and dining facilities are required, it is necessary to determine where in the facilities along the way the required element facilities are located.
However, the conventional technology described above has a problem that, when searching for a desired facility such as a neighborhood gas station or a restaurant during driving on an expressway, the facility has to be searched manually with eyes or by scrolling the display for hours if the facility does not exist in the displayed range, thus the operability of the conventional technology is poor in this respect.
The present invention is to solve the problems described above, and an object thereof is to provide a navigation device, method, and program for outputting information on a desired type of element facility, which exists on an expressway, with simple operation during driving on the expressway.